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Smoked Sausage

A smoked sausage made from lean meat, back-bone fat, sage, sea salt, and pepper, then boiled before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Smoked Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine lean meat, back-bone fat, sage, coarse sea salt, and pepper to prepare the sausage mixture.

  2. Stuff the mixture tightly into strong cotton bags that hold almost 2 pounds each.

  3. Dip the bags in hot water and wring them out well.

Smoke and serve

  1. Close the bags securely and hang them up to smoke for several weeks.

  2. Boil the sausages for 5 hours before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Meat + sagetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean meat
Provides the main protein that forms the body of the sausage.
Back-bone fat
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the sausage from drying out as it cooks.
Sage
Adds the herbal aroma that defines the flavour of the sausage.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the mixture and helps draw out and bind moisture in the meat.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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